UNTIL last night, 2024 had been reasonably accommodating on night-ride road conditions. I was out there pretty consistently for a while.
We’ve had just two snowfalls in the new year so far. It’s mostly been build-the-ark rains that should have been snow. All the rivers are up. Lots of roads have been closed off-and-on due to flooding.
The wetlands on the other side of that drop-off are inundated. It’s a Pawtuxet River flood zone down there.
I’ve had Jenna and Jonny’s travel van here since the last work weekend in Vermont. Can’t even remember when that was. They haven’t missed it, they’ve been mostly in the air. They were in Scotland a few months ago, in Mexico last week. Last month Jenna was in Buenos Aires on business.
Daughter #3 was in Vegas last week, and Daughter #1 changed jobs, so from time to time she’ll be off to the head office in Denmark instead of London.
I don’t go anywhere anymore, not since the Arctic four years ago. That’ll come back or it won’t, it’s all good. I get more reading done sitting around here. Been reading Umberto Eco and Kurt Vonnegut lately.
Sunday I was out riding during the day, did a driveway oil change when I got back. Finished up just as a snow squall moved in.
Here on the left, the primary drive drains aft while the pan up front drains the oil galley behind the filter.
It started to snow just as I poured a quart of oil into the primary case and put the cover back on. It was a head fake; the snow let up half an hour later and got here last night.
Robyn sent this pic from the Lode Ranch in Montana yesterday. A chilly day with the wind, she said, -40F.
On Phantom matters (which I’m always ambivalent writing about here), the dual-timeline Wrack and Ruin series came to a close last Saturday, after seven chapters and 32 months. It ended with Jeff Weigel’s Phantom reflecting for a week on various journeys the characters had walked in both the Mozz prophecy and the present.
In the tale’s closing panel, the Phantom wonders what his actions in the present may have changed, if anything. He may be bound for the unmarked grave Mozz foresaw no matter what, we don’t know. In the prophecy timeline, his lost son’s militia killed him in a fight in the Himalayas.
I might write about the series here at some point. This isn’t a fan site and I don’t want it to become that, but I don’t mind writing about the Phantom now and again if I can make it interesting to readers who don’t follow the strip, those who might appreciate a novel peek into this unique little corner of popular culture.
That said, condensing the Wrack and Ruin series, 465 pages of script, more than 1,500 images, packaging that in a way a non-Phantom fan (most readers here) might appreciate, that’s a heavy lift. It would easily take a week of daily posts, a chapter per day, an introduction, a continuity primer, nine posts…? no, no, the chemo gods are going to have to sideline me again before I sit still long enough for that. They’re going to have to catch me first.
Here’s a Phantom thing worth mentioning before I close, surely of interest to Jermayn, Steve and Dan, the Chronicle Chamber blokes Down Under (there’s a fan site for you), they’re sometimes here: The Wrack and Ruin chapters, and every Phantom story published before the series and those to come, are about to get a whole lot easier to read. Next month, King Features expects to unveil the next generation Comics Kingdom site. I’m told readers will be able to scroll through stories seamlessly, from 1936 through the present day. No more of this clunky click-reload-click-reload-click-reload from one day to the next.
That would certainly solve the space limitations we labor under. In his heyday, Lee Falk had four big panels a day, acres of storytelling room. We have two; two small panels that get even smaller on the days where we sacrifice art to stretch for three.
As things are now, we squeeze in half a storytelling beat per day. But if all of a sudden the reader can scroll seamlessly through the days, weeks, months and years, that changes everything.
Here you see what I mean by half a storytelling beat. This is yesterday strip and today’s.
In the wide open spaces of yesteryear these four panels would have appeared together on the same day. Published half now, half tomorrow, they seem awfully disjointed. With just two panels a day, the narrative rolls with the beat of a flat tire: buh-BUMP, buh-BUMP, buh-BUMP…
In this new story that started yesterday, Bret Blevins and I are revisiting a Lee Falk/Wilson McCoy tale from 1953. Our story shares the title of the original yarn, a conspicuous outlier in the canon. Falk wrote the Phantom as a boor, a manbaby, selfish, cranky, petulant, obnoxious (who does that sound like?). This 1953 Phantom is someone we don’t recognize. He’s wrong on personality, maturity, character, moral compass, how he talks to his wife—the works.
The story’s so off some think Falk didn’t write it, that he had someone ghost it for him. There’s no way to know that. From my point of view it doesn’t matter whose hands were on the keys, Falk’s name is on the story, he owns it.
Bret and I are going to deconstruct the original story, put a different lens on it, create a different way of thinking about it.
That’s about it for now. Back at you one of these days, maybe a night-ride video when the snow goes.
My first 2024 night on the road was January 1. I had taken the obligatory pass on December 31. On that night, as you know, the caution advisory flashes with a particular intensity.
For a few nights I was out there testing a camera mount I had rigged to the side of the top box, see whether it might simulate the view from a sidecar. Didn’t work. There’s too much rocking and rolling around on the ass end of a twin cam Harley; it overcame the GoPro’s image stabilization software. With the bike laden for distance it would have been fine; empty, no. I might yet figure out a solution, but until then I’ll be using the mount up front on the headlight nacelle. That works no matter what.
Ol’ CCjon down in Houston would have gotten a chuckle out of the sidecar view. He’s been trying to convert me to three wheels ever since we struck up a friendship in Haines, Alaska, in 2012. Great days…
We were a motley knot of motorcycle hobos on the docks that night, looking to stow our bikes on the Alaska Marine Highway for a three-day sail down to the Pacific Northwest. If you haven’t seen that post, it’s not the worst time-waster I ever scribbled.
Cheers to all.
Tony DePaul, January 16, 2024, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA
